So You Want to Read Generation Ship Fiction: Here’s Where to Start

Colonizing other planets has to be on humanity’s to-do list if it has any hope of a long-term future. There’s our neighbors in the solar system, of course, but unless we want to die with our own sun, we’ll have to travel to other stars. Presuming the absence of faster than light technology or something similar, the only option we’ll likely have will be to set out in “generation ships”: massive crafts designed to support generations of humans who will be born, live, and die aboard the ship on a journey that could take hundreds of years. Chances are we won’t see a real generation ship in our own lifetime, but science fiction writers have been exploring the concept for decades. Here are suggestions for generation ship fiction, old and new.